Monday, October 09, 2006

Outsourcing

After attending Data Center World I came away feeling that practically everyone worked for a corporate data center that was run by the company. There was a Target presentation about a finely tuned center with awesome policies and procedures. There was a presentation about how the state of Oregon consolidated all of their data centers into one. I do however, also see a fair number of companies that stick to the "do what we do best and outsource the rest" mentality.

Looking through some of my old bookmarks I found this article that gives a lot of good statistics about outsourcing. I am still a strong believer in outsourcing what your company does not excel in. Many take it to the extreme of outsourcing everything that is not the core business of the company. As with most things I suppose it is just a mix of working with what you have, beliefs of management of the company and timing. I have worked with another company recently that did outsource a number of things and for whatever reasons they hired a new CIO and had him start bringing everything back in house.

I think in the end it is just a numbers game and proving to the board of directors what you believe works best and ROI.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

The "new" Workstream data cente was outsourced to Bell Canada, as outlined in their press release. The data centre is actually a high quality tier 4 facility located outside the downtown core of Toronto and operated by Fusepoint Managed Services.

About Me

John Rath is a veteran IT professional and regular contributor at Data Center Knowledge. He has served many roles in the data center, including support, system administration, web development and facility management. John started a data center links news site in 2006 and has since authored numerous blog posts, magazine articles and white papers on a variety of data center topics.